Dortmund Data Bank

With a view to the synthesis and design of separation processes, fitting and critical examination of model parameters used for process simulation and the development of group contribution methods 1973 a computerized data bank for phase equilibrium data was started by J. Gmehling and U. Onken at the University of Dortmund.

While at the beginning mainly VLE data for non-electrolyte mixtures (Tb > 0 °C) were considered, later on also VLE including compounds with Tb<0°C, LLE, hE, g∞, azeotropic, cPE, SLE, vE, adsorption equilibrium, polymer data, transport properties, ... for non-electrolyte and electrolyte systems as well as pure component properties were stored. The DDB currently (2018-November) contains 8.1 million data tuples for approximately 74,300 components from 83,800 references (174,000 evaluated). The data bank can be searched online for free (only data from the open literature are reported).

The Dortmund Data Bank (DDB) now contains nearly all worldwide available phase equilibrium data, excess properties, transport properties and pure component properties even for polymer and electrolyte systems. The status of the Dortmund Data Bank Version 2018 is given below in a diagram.

Besides the easily accessible thermo-physical properties from scientific literature (J. Chem. Eng. Data, J. Chem. Thermodyn., Fluid Phase Equilib., Thermochim. Acta, and Int. J. Thermophys.) DDB contains a great part of data not available via the open literature (systematic measurements for the development of predictive tools, private communications, confidential data from industry, BSc., MSc and PhD theses, … from all over the world).

These data will not be provided by online-services and are not made available to competitors of DDBST GmbH. The only access to these data is via a DDB inhouse license.

The regular yearly update of the DDB can be judged from the figure below. DDB grows by nearly 8% per year in data volume. Nearly all data input is done at DDBST GmbH in Oldenburg by long term employees with many years of experience with support from colleagues in China, Japan, Korea, Estonia, ….